Towards sustainable supply chains for electric mobility

Abstract

While electric cars have several benefits during their use phase, they are associated with various environmental impacts and social risks in their supply chain, especially due to the batteries. The sustainability assessment of such products with global supply chains is complicated due to regional differences of technology, environment, markets, and society. Therefore, concepts and methods for a spatially differentiated sustainability assessment have been developed in the author’s dissertation. This article provides an overview of the methodological contributions and summarizes selected results from an illustrative application to lithium‐ion batteries. The environmental and social impact scores of a battery system differ considerably across the three investigated supply chain configurations, which also influence the geographic distribution of economic value added. These results open promising research opportunities to advance the design of sustainable supply chains for electric mobility.